The government announcement of an additional £740 million to increase specialist provision and inclusion in mainstream should be celebrated. After all, it’s an enabler of a more inclusive education system. Or is it?
It could be argued that it is simply throwing good money after bad. At a time when we’re consistently reminded about the hostility of the fiscal environment, when we know the SEND system is broken and getting worse, and when the school estate is crumbling from years of low investment, do we have the evidence base to invest three-quarters of a billion pounds in this way?
State of the specialist estate
Special schools are beyond saturation point. Up and down the country, numbers on roll have crept up every year since 2015 and continue to do so, with virtually no capital investment.
Many of the special schools in our trust are subject to tens of tribunal directions each year, and every year the cycle repeats. Class sizes are growing, and we’re on the knife edge of equilibrium shift; the quality of the offer from our state specialist sector faces overwhelm from the sheer volume of placements, many more of which are correct specialist placements, just increasingly in the wrong settings.
Free special schools aren’t being built anywhere near the right number or at an acceptable pace. The sector is crying out for capital investment, and in the absence of this the unavoidable collapse we are already seeing a huge flow of pupils into high-cost independent provision or out of education altogether. The IFS just this week have published a report which highlights this risk.
For too many, there is already nowhere else to go, and even the best will and the best strategy, this isn’t going to change during this parliament.
State of the mainstream estate
Nobody would claim we have the most modern and impressive asset portfolio when it comes to our state schools, but what we know is that we face a significant reduction in our primary numbers that will work its way through to secondary over the next few years.
Prioritising hundreds of millions on the expansion of mainstream schools therefore looks pretty ludicrous for our primary sector, when the state specialist sector has the opposite problem (with rising rolls and massively reduced physical space).
We also know that the leadership and oversight of specialist provision is a skillset informed by years of practice. With a teacher recruitment crisis impacting on the supply and retention of leaders, do we honestly believe that broadening the current responsibility of school leaders will have a positive impact?
Are our mainstream heads crying out for more complexity of need? Is their issue with SEND sufficiency really that they don’t have space on site? I’d argue is isn’t .
Evidence-free policy
We all want a more consistently inclusive mainstream system. Yet to my knowledge nobody has argued that the reason for the current SEND dysfunctions is that there isn’t the physical space for it in mainstream. It’s about meeting need, which comes back most often to human resources and the need for additional funding to cover those costs.
In essence, we’re about to spend £740 million on a best-intention assumption. It feels worryingly likely that the Whitehall view is that inclusion is about aesthetics, the image of children with additional needs being in a mainstream setting.
For some pupils, that might be what is materially best for them. However, specialist settings exist because of specialist needs. If the government was serious about redressing imbalance, they’d be using this funding to address immediate needs.
And they’d be doing that in tandem with a step-change improvement in the early identification, assessment and support of children and families. This would support better outcomes and give us better evidence for where capacity needs to be in the long-term.
Instead, all we have are policy tram lines shooting off in different directions, failing to fulfil the potential that a new mission-led government should bring.
Where we need connectedness and strategic vision, we have motherhood and apple pie politics, devoid of evidence and immersed in denial about root causes.
The likely outcome
I want to believe that this cash injection will help rebalance the system and reduce the demand for special school places. I really do. But this feels like another opportunity lost.
The most likely outcome is that we end up with multi-million-pound adaptions that offer an immaterial impact on the sufficiency of specialist placements.
Meanwhile, mainstream schools will continue to be under huge pressure from our accountability system to pursue the narrow path of attainment and progress measures. As Jonny Uttley and Frank Norris have argued in these pages this week, ill-conceived reform could actually make that worse.
And the challenges of poverty, globalisation and all the other societal factors that have surely played their part in the surge in demand for specialist provision will continue – unacknowledged and unfettered.
Ultimately, families will continue to feel alienated, tribunals will continue to be sought and local authorities will continue to direct special schools to take pupils. Some may stay in a mainstream building longer, but the reality is that they probably could and should have anyway.
There will be winners, at least in the short term. Some private specialist providers with eye-watering profit margins will see their turnover increase further. The cost to local authorities is already £2 billion per year.
And losers. State-funded special schools will be overcrowded, starved of essential investment, and blamed for high needs overspends even though special schools are, paradoxically, forced to take more and more pupils while being systemically underfunded. (If you don’t believe me, look at what councils do and don’t have to pay special schools in the DfE’s high needs operational guidance!)
A better way
This latest announcement needs an urgent rethink.
We need a white paper that connects multiple strategies into one cogent and cohesive vision for the next four years and beyond. One based on a full, open-minded understanding of the drivers that have led us here and the funding pressures schools are having to absorb.
We need to stop the wilful and deliberate denial of the current cost of SEND and accept reality. Only then will we be able to effect short-term system change while preparing responsibly for what’s coming in the medium term.
Anything else is a concession to even greater in hedge-fund profiteering and dereliction of duty to families who have to fight tooth and nail for the right provision for their child – none of whom to my knowledge have raised issue with the state of their child’s mainstream school building.
